Alan Davey is a Spurs fan, so he has experienced pain, but not necessarily pain like this. At the end of his first week as chief executive of the Arts Council, he is having to explain why almost 200 arts organisations are getting the chop - the biggest change in the artistic landscape in the council's 60-year history.

No amount of "time for change" rhetoric is going to satisfy his critics, one of whom has called Davey an "assassin in a check-shirt". To the embarrassment of Davey's minder he was indeed wearing a blue check-shirt yesterday as he made his winners-and-losers presentation at Hampstead Theatre. But "assassin" hardly fits this affable, chubby, moon-faced 47-year-old, who has chosen an unfortunate week to quit the civil service - he was director of culture at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport - and poke his shiny, balding head above the parapet.

"We civil servants are used to doing things behind the scenes," he tells me in the theatre's glass-walled boardroom after he has faced down his critics, "but it's exciting all of a sudden to be the person who's doing it. Running your own organisation is a big change from just being a cog in the machine."

Exciting for him; less so for the losers. Does he feel their anguish?

"These are hard decisions to make, but they're much harder decisions to receive. But we've got to look at the whole arts sector. Organisations change and the world in which they're working changes, and we have to invest in new people. The easiest thing to do would be to keep funding everyone, but I think it's right that we are confident, courageous and exercise judgment."

He cites Brian McMaster's recent report, Supporting Excellence in the Arts, with its call for the Arts Council to back good art rather than good intentions.

"Simon Rattle once railed against the Arts Council for not being prepared to back its judgment and shape things," says Davey. "The council we've got now was prepared to bite the bullet and do it." What it is no longer prepared to countenance, he says, is "equal misery for all".

Davey is resigned to those who are about to experience total misery making a lot of noise. "Any organisation that makes decisions is going to get flak," he says, "and possibly the arts world hasn't been used to the Arts Council making such far-reaching decisions as this. It's inevitable that we hear more about the losers than the winners. It's in the losers' interest to speak up." He denies that the organisations which have won reprieves did so because of well-orchestrated PR campaigns and celebrity support.

"Some of those who were raising high decibel levels were not restored."